Daughters
Her blood singing notes so high she doesn’t think them possible, Nella runs from the Stadhuis. She runs faster than she has ever run in her life, faster than when she was a girl, chasing Carel or Arabella through the woods and fields. People turn to watch her, this mad young woman with her mouth wide open, her eyes streaming – with the wind, they suppose. Where is she, Nella thinks, where has she gone? The burgomasters haven’t got her yet. There was no sign of her when Nella had stumbled to the bottom of the gallery steps, so she ran up the Heiligeweg and is now on the Kalverstraat. Nella, always nimble, propelled by a force that lets her fly.
But when she reaches the miniaturist’s house, she stops dead.
The door is still there, but the sign of the sun has gone. The rays of the heavenly body have been roughly hacked from the brickwork, the motto is half vanished, all that is left is For A Toy. Mounds of brick dust pile up on the step and the door has been left ajar.
Finally – today of all days – Nella can go inside. She looks up and down the street. The wool-seller opposite is nowhere to be seen. Let them put me in the Spinhuis for trespassing, she thinks, let them drown me too.
Nella pushes the door open and slips into a small room. It is shockingly bare, the floorboards scratched and dirty, empty shelves on exposed walls. How Cornelia would love to attack this place with her vinegar and beeswax. It looks as if it’s never been inhabited.
There is another room at the back, but that looks stripped of life as well. Nella moves silently up a wooden staircase, thinking her ribs will barely cage her heaving lungs.
When she gets to the top, her breath stops in her throat. A wide worktop has been built, running round all four walls; another square room, the floorboards dusty, the windows smeared with streaks of rain. But on the worktop, a world.
Tiny, unfinished pieces of furniture scatter across one part of the bench. Half-sawn and abandoned – oak, ash, mahogany, beech – chairs and tables, beds and cots, even a coffin, dressers, picture frames. There are enough pieces here to furnish ten, twenty cabinets, a lifetime of supplies. In a charred-out hearth, minuscule copper pans and imperfect pewter saucers spill like foreign currency, and the arms of a shrunken candlestick reach out like tiny tendrils.
And then the dolls. Rows and rows of puppet citizens – old men, young ladies, priests and militiamen, a herring-seller, a boy with a bandage on his eyes – and is that Arnoud Maakvrede, with his apron and a round red face? Some headless, others legless, some with blank faces, others with their hair elaborately curled, small hats the size of moths’ heads.
With trembling fingers, Nella sorts through the city of Amsterdam for a new Johannes, for one last desperate hope that he will live. Sunday at sundown – the three words wreathe in her mind like a never-ending curse. She spies a baby, no larger than her thumbnail, curled up, eyes closed with a small smile.
Then she cries out. Before her is a miniature house, small enough to sit in her palm. It is her house – nine rooms and five human figures carved within, the woodwork considered and intricate. Each room contains a miniature of the miniature she was sent, the green chairs, the lute, the cradle. Astonished, she encloses her life in the centre of her fist.
Nella puts it in her coat pocket with the baby, and after some hesitation she takes Arnoud too. The old residue of Cornelia’s superstition about idols is difficult to shake off, but Nella grips them tight, desperate for some comfort in the absence of any miniature Johannes.
Stacked up neatly and clipped with a peg, a pile of letters lies to Nella’s left. Her hands still shaking, she picks them up and begins to flick through the sheaf. One: Please – I have come to see you several times, but still you do not answer. Another: I received your miniature. Are you saying I shouldn’t marry him? Another: My husband threatens to stop this, but then I cannot bear to live. Another: You sent my twelve-year-old a cat; I must ask you to desist. Another: Thank you. He has been dead ten years and I miss him every day. Another: How did you know? I feel a madness creeping in. Some are merely lists: Two puppies, black and white, but one must be a runt. A looking-glass, holding a beautiful face.
Nella rifles for her own, and there it is, the first one written in October last year when she was newly arrived, when Marin stirred the silt and Cornelia could not yet be counted on as a friend. I cannot guess, she’d written, but that you are trained in the art of small things. How long ago that feels.
All this time, she thinks, I have been watched and guarded, taught and taunted. But never has she felt more vulnerable. Here she is – hidden in the middle of so many of Amsterdam’s women, their secret fears and hopes. She is no different. She is Agnes Meermans. She is the twelve-year-old. She is the woman who will miss her husband every day. We are legion, we women; in thrall to the miniaturist. I thought she was stealing my life, but in truth she opened its compartments and let me look inside.
Wiping her eyes, she finds all her other notes – including the long missive she lost the day Jack turned up in the hall, in which she requested the board game verkeerspel. It is still attached to the promissory note of five hundred guilders. Let that be the oil on your front door’s stubborn hinges, she had written, but the miniaturist hadn’t even exchanged it. She hadn’t taken the money.
She must have been watching me in the Old Church that day, Nella thinks – when Otto went to pray and Agnes grabbed me by the sleeve. Surely the only way she would have known I wanted a verkeerspel board was to creep up and pick my pocket? They say that watchers are always watched in Amsterdam, even those who cannot see.
Yet all this smacks too much of Cornelia’s spy, and not enough of Nella’s prophetess. She inhales the papers, as if to catch the miniaturist’s scent – a Norwegian pine perhaps, or the cooling scent of lakeside mint. But there is only dry paper, smelling vaguely of Nella’s own room. This letter was intended for the miniaturist, and somehow she received it.
There are annotations down the side of her letters. Parakeet – green. Husband – yes, Johannes Brandt. She fights to emerge. Many doors without a key, and more than one explorer. The dog. The sister, the servant. Maps that cannot span their world. A constant searcher, a tulip planted in my soil who won’t have space to grow. Don’t go back. Loneliness. Talk to the English boy. Try and make him see.
A tulip planted in my soil, Nella repeats.
Someone is downstairs, closing the front door, clomping around in heavy boots. Nella looks desperately for somewhere to hide, and scurries along into the upper back room. The only thing in it is an unmade narrow bed. Crawling under its frame, she waits.
‘Are you up there?’ calls a voice. It is a man’s voice, soft and slightly querulous. He sounds strange to Nella’s ears, not from this city. ‘I’ve come,’ he says. ‘There’ve been too many letters. I warned you again and again not to do this.’
He waits, Nella waits. The dust from the floor gets into her nose and before she can stop it, she sneezes. The sound of the boots becomes louder. He’s coming up the wooden stairs. Now he begins shuffling around the workshop, tutting as he picks things up and places them back down, muttering as he rummages through the miniaturist’s handiwork. ‘Such a talent,’ Nella hears him say. ‘Such a waste.’
He stops. Nella freezes, barely breathing.
‘Petronella, why are you hiding under the bed?’ he calls through the other room. Nella doesn’t move, a chill creeping through her, blood pounding in her head. Her throat constricts, her eyes feel hot. How does he know my name?
‘I can see your feet,’ he goes on. ‘Come on, child. We haven’t time for this.’ This last comment makes him chuckle. Nella thinks she might vomit from the terror.
‘Come, Petronella. Let us discuss your strange events.’
His voice is not unkind. Although Nella would rather spend the rest of this awful day hiding under the miniaturist’s slovenly bed than face the world – his invitation, delivered so gently, so temptingly, makes her crawl out from her hiding place.
On seeing an old man before her, she cries out in surprise. He is so small, she feels twice his size. ‘Who are you?’ she asks.
His rheumy eyes widen, and he backs away. A solitary puff of white hair rests on top of his head like an afterthought. ‘But you’re not Petronella,’ he says, mystified.
‘Yes I am,’ Nella says, her panic beginning to rise. You are Petronella, she tells herself. Of course you are. ‘Who are you?’ she demands again, trying to make her voice a challenge.
The old man looks at her suspiciously. ‘I’m Lucas Windelbreke.’ Nella sinks onto the bed. ‘She’s gone,’ he says sadly, looking around the corners of the room. ‘I know it.’
‘The miniaturist?’
‘Petronella.’
Nella shakes her head, as if to knock her own name out of her ears. ‘Petronella? Seigneur – the woman who lived here was called Petronella?’
‘Indeed she was, Madame. In our tongue, is it such an uncommon name?’
Nella supposes not – her own mother shares her name, and Agnes made the same observation back at the silversmiths’ feast. ‘But she’s from Norway,’ Nella says, trying to control her confusion. ‘She’s from Bergen.’
A cloud passes over Lucas Windelbreke’s face. ‘Her mother was from Bergen. Petronella grew up with me in Bruges.’
‘But why?’
‘Why?’ echoes Windelbreke, looking forlornly round the room. ‘Because Petronella is my daughter.’
Nella hears the last word he utters, but it doesn’t make sense. It seems impossible to call the miniaturist daughter – it conjures Assendelft, a mother, a strange safety, the comfort of human flaw. ‘I don’t believe you,’ she says. ‘She’s the miniaturist, she doesn’t—’
‘We all have to come from somewhere, Madame,’ Windelbreke says. ‘Do you think she was born from an egg?’
The question jars in Nella’s mind. She’s sure she’s heard it before. ‘Her mother’s family wouldn’t have her,’ he says.
‘Why not?’
Windelbreke says nothing, looking away.
‘I wrote to you, Seigneur,’ Nella says, feeling dizzy, sitting back down on the bed.
‘If you did, your letter was one of many.’